Facebook Video Obsession Spoils a Charitable Cause

Copying someone else’s content is unethical but did you ever imagine that downloading a Youtube video and sharing it on your Facebook page could stop floods of donations from going to orphans?

A Facebook community page copied a social media awareness video which was originally created by the Prague-based Hayot Films video production studio as part of its #Likelife campaign which has two main objectives:

The Youtube monetization money will be donated by Hayot Films to charita.cz – a non-profit organization that supports orphans in need, regardless of age, gender, religion or ethnicity.

People who watch the video or share the direct link will automatically become members of the project, raising online awareness about the cause. Read more about the project #LikeLife

Original Video from Youtube

How Stealing Content Can Harm a Charitable Cause?

The campaign video went viral after being copied by the Facebook page, which probably found it as an opportunity to gain more views and likes out of this professionally executed video despite the disclaimer which clearly states the cause behind the video.

“It’s sad that our video on Youtube is not getting enough views, because it’s monetized on Youtube and we wanted to give money from this for charity. We can’t control the Internet, not only that Facebook page publish the video on their own page, but other pages as well. Our video published in 3 languages on Youtube and summary got already about 40 000 views. Our goals were to show this video for more people to think about their social life and second one is help for charity. First one is ok, we got already more than 1,500,000 views (updated), second one is not good. We really wanted to give money from monetization on Youtube for charity. We’ll see how much we will gain.”

HayotFilms Reply

How to protect your copyrights on social media?

You always need to monitor your work online, check if someone copied it and didn’t give you the proper credit, or if that infringes your copyrights, so you can quickly contact the platform help desk to take down the stolen pieces and safe your business from losing opportunities because of internet thieves.

We strongly argue HayotFilms to report trademark and content infringement using this form.